Ever wanted to top the Facebook apps chart? Well there is an interesting piece on Blonde 2.0 exploring the research done by Asi Sharabi of No-Man’s Blog about sustainable Facebook apps. If you didn’t know what is the sheer volume of apps on Facebook, apparently there are currently 20,861 applications on Facebook, 170 of which have over 1 million users. The research has determined what makes sustainable app on Facebook by studying the most popular 100 Facebook apps, and here are the result :

Identity Formation / Social Comparison (44%)
- Flirting Games: flirtable, are you interested, Likeness

Self presentations tools:
- Funny “virtual pub games”?: what’s your stripper name?, which cartoon are you?, what kind of drunk are you?
- Hobbies/interests: Films , music Dogbook

Phatic interactions / games (39%)
- Games: Poker, puzzles, mindjolt, zombies ,werewolves and car races.

Tools / extensions / social management (17%)
- Extensions: IM, super wall, fun wall, Top Friends etc.

As a final thought, Ayelet at Blonde 2.0 says that the number of installs doensn’t indicate how good apps are and in order to stay sustainable developers need to bear in mind what grabs audiences’ imagination as well as how to engage with different types interests by adding a value to the end users. Adding to the point, I think Facebook apps do need to stand by genuine causes instead of pure gimicks and Tibetan Freedom Torch Relay app by Samsung is an excellent example for it.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 31st, 2008 at 4:49 pm by Lewis Webb and is filed under Social Networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.